Performance drop for add-on development on JIRA 7.2

[pelizza]

Hi,

As an add-on developer, I recently upgraded my local environment in order to use the new JIRA 7.2 version. I have noticed some compatibility problems on AUI, but that is fine.

The main problem here is that JIRA is toooo slow. The performance is really poor and I have to wait a lot to load any screen, using HSQLDB or even PostgreSQL as well. Also, sometimes the project side bar displays an error and doesn't render the items, because of some timeout when trying to render.

Does someone experienced this performance drop?

Thanks!

[pelizza · Accepted solution]

After some time, I realized the solution is as simple as "pressing b". When you are on any page of JIRA, press "b" to switch between "dev mode" and "fast mode".

In addition to that, stop using Fast Dev (it's unsupported at this time) and use Quick Reload instead. It's the default mechanism for new add-ons.

Cheers!

[Petar Petrov (Appfire)]

Are you starting JIRA in developer mode (atlas-run, atlas-debug)? If yes - enable quick reload and enable resource batching - see the "Controlling web batching" section. The UI will be much faster with resource batching enabled - you can switch between modes by pressing the key B on any JIRA UI page.

[pelizza]

Thanks for the tip! I'll try it here. Indeed, I'm using atlas-debug together with Fast Dev.

Actually I've tried quick reload a few weeks ago but I ran into some issues regarding static resources. I had to redeploy the add-on after changing any .js or .css file.

I'll try to update my SDK to the latest version and use Quick Reload again. I'll let you know about the results.

Thanks for the quick answer 

[Petar Petrov (Appfire)]

Yes, when batching is enabled, resources will not be loaded from the filesystem, but you can easily switch between batching/dev mode by pressing the B key.

[pelizza]

Ok, now I've got it.

So, if I'm developing on frontend side, editing .js and .css files all the time, I need to switch to fastdev so my resources are reloaded, and that will make JIRA slow again, is that right?

And, why was JIRA at a "normal performance" even using fastdev before version 7.2? Any guess?

[Petar Petrov (Appfire)]

Yes, that's right - when developing UI you need to be in dev mode, when you develop backend, run automated tests or just browse, you can disable it. No idea why performance has dropped - maybe the amount of cacheable resources which are being downloaded has increased significantly. When dev mode is enabled, resources can't be cached by the browser so each page load downloads thousands of files, 8-10 MBs.

[pelizza]

Hey @Petar Petrov [Botron] and @Steven Behnke,

I still didn't find why the performance of JIRA 7.2 is poorer, and also didn't try to change to quick reload.

However, I've found that running JIRA using atlas-run instead of atlas-debug makes it get the good old performance back.

As soon as I try quick reload I will post the results here, but it seems that the overall performance drop is not related to that.

[Steven F Behnke]

Thanks for the heads up. I typically use atlas-run by default and only use atlas-debug when I want to connect my remote debugger.

[Petar Petrov (Appfire)]

It really depends on how amps sets the atlassian.dev.mode java property - in my case it is enabled even if I start with atlas-run. Quick reload allows you to dynamically turn that on and off. When developing plugins I really only use atlas-debug, as you'll always need to debug at some point and restarting JIRA takes sooo long. Even when using atlas-debug, if dev mode is off, you'll get good performance.

[Steven F Behnke]

Just to be clear, Fastdev is broken and deprecated. QuickReload as Peter notes is the tool you should use now. Please disable Fastdev.

[Petar Petrov (Appfire)]

Right, when I said fastdev in the comments I actually meant "dev mode" - I've edited my comments above.

[pelizza]

Ok, thank you guys. I'll definitely try that then.

I'm just a bit worried about static resources, but I'm gonna try and post the results here.